The Alarming Secret in my Husband’s Closet

The discovery of size 12 high heels in my husband’s closet after I had kicked him out was quite a shock. How could I have not known my husband of 25 years was a crossdresser?  

Shortly before this surprising discovery, our tumultuous marriage came to an end when I found out that my husband was cheating with the wife of one of his coworkers. To add to this upsetting discovery of women’s shoes that were not mine in my husband’s closet, was the startling revelation that he was a cross dresser. It had never dawned on me that my husband was in to wearing women’s clothing. This discovery of the high heels got me thinking about our past life together and the clues that I somehow had missed. 

Thinking back, I remembered the times when I was downstairs and went upstairs to retrieve something from out bedroom. I had turned the doorknob and had been surprised to find it locked. When I knocked on the door and asked my husband to open up, he would take a long time before letting me in. This was curious to me at the time, but I dismissed it and didn’t question his delay. It never occurred to me that he was trying on women’s clothing and had to take time to change back into his regular clothing to hide his secret. Often times this occurred during daytime when he wouldn’t have been sleeping. The harsh reality was that his delay in answering the bedroom door wasn’t from being awoken. He was wide awake conducting this deviant behavior.

In retrospect he had a low libido throughout our marriage which was very frustrating to me. I didn’t think much turned him on. I was considered to be pretty and kept myself trim and well groomed. Often when we were at a party other men would come on to me. One friend whispered into my ear when his wife was at the other end of the room “Someday I’m going to have you.” I ignored the remark and attributed it to the fact that he had too much to drink. But I couldn’t help thinking that I wished my husband felt that way. In spite of his low libido, I conceived five children. And it only took me six weeks after we married before I became pregnant with our first.  But I was the one who initiated love making. This was a blow to my self-esteem. 

I felt badly when my female friends would complain that their husbands wanted sex too often. That was an issue that I certainly couldn’t relate to.  I remembered a good friend saying that often while she was sleeping her husband would wake her up during the night for sex after he watched porn movies. This annoyed her and made me think “I wish I had that problem.” 

After the shock that my ex-husband was a crossdresser, I did some research into this behavior that was so abhorrent to me. There seems to be no clear-cut answers. Was he homosexual? One time I read a newspaper article to my husband about a group of heterosexual males whom got hold of some homosexuals and threw them into the local river. I was horrified, but my husband’s angry response was “It served those gays right!” His overreaction made me think of Shakespeare’s famous quote “"Me thinks thou dost protest too much."

Another theory is that crossdressing can be so shameful that serious mental illness ensues such as depression and substance abuse. This was certainly the case with my husband. 

I didn’t delve too much into the cause of crossdressing. One of the things that did puzzle me about the practice was why would a man want to wear a bra, pantyhose, or high heels? All are so restricting and uncomfortable! 

They say that Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. Maybe my ex-husband (now deceased) thought he was from both planets. The mysterious object found in my husband’s closet was women’s high heels in his size. The mystery is more about why I didn’t pick up on it during a 25-year marriage than why a man would want to cross-dress. Both remain a puzzlement when I think about it. But fortunately, I’ve let it go.

What does “letting go” really mean? An internet definition is that it’s releasing anything that disrupts your happiness and no longer serves you on your journey. Letting go is a choice to decide that you will no longer ruminate on things that are out of your control, and focus on what you can control, instead. Letting go creates space for fresh beginnings: stripping you of what happened yesterday, and enabling the doors of brand new opportunities to open today. Makes sense to me.

We all want closure and not knowing the true nature of a man I thought I knew but didn’t is something that could give me a lot of angst if I let it. 

My ex-husband died of lung cancer and a brain tumor that was discovered to be the size of a grapefruit. I always speculated if his bizarre behavior—other than crossdressing—was caused by more than his alcoholism. I wondered how long his brain tumor was latent. I got my answer with a recent visit to a neurosurgeon. He said “usually a brain tumor can be latent for four or five years, however for a large tumor, it can be slow growing and take up to 10 years before it is diagnosed. It can change one’s personality.”  

Even though my ex-husband knew he was terminally ill and didn’t have much time left, he never apologized to me or the children for what he put us through. He held on to his denial. One of my daughters overheard a discussion that he had a few days before he died with his hospice nurse. He told her that his wife (me) put a lot of pressure on him with her insistence on having a large family that he had to support. I laughed when I heard this because the fact is that four out of five of our children were not planned; they were unplanned.

I can speak for my husband as well as myself when I can say that all of our children were well loved. And thankfully, they are all blessed with a sense of humor. When they found out other clues of his cross-dressing they handled the disclosure better than I did. One daughter said “I wish I had known Dad liked women’s clothing; I would have borrowed some of them.”